But note how Jesus put “flesh” on these concepts and truths to make the seemingly intangible real and tangible. He did so by expressing these truths in words, phrases, and analogies drawn from where? Not primarily from the experience and vocabulary of the religious academy of his day but directly from the circumstances and vocabularies of those he communicated with and among whom he worked and conversed for 18 years. Words, phrases, and analogies that include salt of the earth, the light of a lamp, a cloak given away, rust and moths, birds of the air, lilies of the field, sawdust in the eye, narrow and broad gates, wolves and sheep, the fruit of the tree, houses built on sand or rock, the holes of foxes, the nests of birds, brides and bridegrooms, weddings and other feasts, patches on garments, new and old wineskins, sheep without shepherds, workers for the harvest fields, children in the marketplace, a sheep in a pit, an ox in a ditch, a house swept clean, yeast in the dough, fish in the net, good and bad servants, sowers of seeds, reapers of harvests, the size of a mustard seed, wheat in a field, weeds in a field, stony or thorny ground, landlords and tenants, workers in a vineyard, winepresses and millstones, the fruit of the vine, vines and branches, taxes to Caesar, clean and unclean cups, oil for lamps, fruitful and barren fig trees, sheep separated from goats, a child in the midst, and wine and bread. Often woven into stories and parables, such words and phrases were designed to both enlighten and provoke questions—stories and parables again drawn largely from his own knowledge and experience of the lives and circumstances of his hearers.12
Also note the nature of the venues where he met and encountered people: yes, sometimes in a synagogue or formal place of learning, but more often on a hill beside a lake, in a small boat pushed off from the shore, in a disciple’s house, at a party with tax collectors and prostitutes, in the marketplace, at a wedding feast, at religious feasts, in a garden, on the road, at a well, and in dozens of other places where he was accessible to sick people, poor people, inquirers, skeptics, critics, lawyers, scribes, priests, soldiers, tax collectors, women, and children.
This is incarnational communication, with three distinctive characteristics: (1) The communicator literally embodies and personifies the truths to be communicated. (2) The communicator has so immersed himself or herself in the community that he or she is an integral part of it, not distant from it. (3) The communication is expressed as much as possible within the conceptual frameworks and in the vocabulary not of the communicator but of the community to be influenced. It is today what communications consultants would call receiver-oriented communication.
Source-Oriented Versus
Receiver-Oriented Communication
There is an old and simple model, originating with electronic engineers, of how communication works that I have found most helpful in framing my own communication efforts on both political and religious subjects. It conceptualizes communication as originating with a source who wishes to generate a response from a receiver through the transmission of information (messages) via a medium. The communication occurs in a context that significantly influences it and is complicated by the existence of noise—competing information and messages.
The communication is further complicated by the fact that messages from the source and responses from the receiver both pass through the respective communication grids of each—defining aspects of their respective cultures, conceptual frameworks, thought patterns, and vocabularies that shape the formation and reception of the messages and feedback. When the source’s grid is significantly different than the receiver’s grid, we encounter all the challenges of cross-cultural communication, such as when oil companies communicate with Indigenous peoples, scientists communicate with politicians, or believers communicate with non-believers on spiritual topics.
Source-oriented communicators express their ideas in the way those ideas came to them (the source), in the words and phrases of the source’s vocabulary and conceptual framework, and in venues and through media with which the source is most familiar and comfortable. Such communicators often live and operate at considerable psychological, social, and physical distance from the rank and file of the public. They put much of the onus of understanding what is being communicated on the audience rather than assuming that burden themselves.
Scientists and academics, preachers and professors, and persons in positions of authority such as corporate executives and high-level civil servants tend to be source-oriented communicators. Moses and the scribes and Pharisees13 of Jesus’ day were for the most part source-oriented communicators—indeed this is generally the communication style of lawgivers. While this communication style certainly has its place and is highly effective in peer-to-peer communications, it is generally far less effective in communicating with the general public.
If you are a receiver-oriented communicator you will also have definite communications objectives and messages that you as the source want to convey in order to generate a desired audience response. But you do not start planning your communications from the source-oriented perspective of “what do I want to say?”; rather you start with “who are these people I am communicating with?” What are they like—their hopes, their fears, their attitudes, their backgrounds? What do they know or not know about me and my subject? What is their vocabulary? What are their venue and media preferences? What competing information and messages are they receiving? What will be the physical circumstances and psychological climate when and where I will be communicating with them? Then, having asked and answered these questions about the intended receivers of your communication—much easier to do accurately if you have lived and worked among them—you now proceed to framing your communication and messages with the needs and character of your audience (the receivers) uppermost in your mind.14
Genuine democratic discourse requires that politicians and political communicators be more receiver-oriented than source-oriented.15 And I would argue that as Christians desirous of effectively communicating to others the spiritual truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ we also need to be much more receiver-oriented—personally embodying the gospel’s central characteristic of self-sacrificial love, fully immersing ourselves among those we seek to serve, and framing our messages in the terms and words that they would use if they understood our message and were communicating it to someone else.
The psalmist (and political leader) David was a receiver-oriented communicator, as were many of the Old Testament prophets. But Jesus of Nazareth was the master of this style of communication. By embodying the truths he sought to communicate, by practising the self-sacrificial love that he preached, he gained an authority in spiritual matters that exceeded that of the scribes and Pharisees. As he spoke and taught in terms and words that the common people used and could understand, people were willing to listen to him, flocked to hear him, and were amazed at what they saw and heard.16 The Sermon on the Mount was effective because the sermonizer was not some distant moralizer but a communicator incarnate and embedded in the lives and culture of those whom he addressed in words and phrases drawn from their own experiences.17 As even the temple guards sent to arrest him acknowledged, “No one ever spoke the way this man does.”18
Implications for Us
As previously mentioned, if we believe in the providential placement of ourselves as human beings in particular places and times in order to participate in achieving God’s purposes in the world, the first challenge for us is to discern those purposes and to live and act in the light of them, just as Jesus did.
But if those purposes